Whoever Recieves You Receives Me

Last Sunday we had an opportunity to celebrate Father’s Day with my son and his family. The day was made more special because it gave us an opportunity to celebrate several pivotal events in our lives: 3 recent birthdays an Eagle Scout award and a high school graduation. It was a great day with lots of fun and laughter and good food. As opposed to earlier years when the youngsters’ attention span and interests were limited, and usually became restless after having spent the requisite amount of time with the adults. This Sunday they remained with us throughout the day. It became apparent that they were interested in what we all had to say. It was no longer obligatory for the youngsters to “hang around;” they enjoyed themselves as they listened and contributed. When I wondered, did we suddenly become relevant?

I believe that I became a better parent when I became a grandfather. As a grandparent I am more a spectator than an active participant and now have the luxury of being able to sit back and watch and listen to how their stories all play out. Sure, I know some of the challenges my son and daughter-in-law face in rearing children are the same as the ones we and our parents faced, but the world and our culture are more complex today and the pressures on parents to manage these challenges are greater than the ones we faced. As a “spectator” I am in awe as to how our son and daughter-in-law work through the endless requests and issues that pop up on a daily, if not hourly basis, and I ask myself, “when did he learn to do all that; where did he pick up all the skills to handle this? I don’t think I would have done it as well.” I have learned so much about parenting in watching them and while it makes me feel good to think that there’s probably some imprinting going on, they are far ahead of where I was then.


Life, wrote Kierkegaard, can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.

Along those lines few years ago I saw an interview with actor Michael Douglas on a late night talk show. He spoke of his relationship with his father, Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas; I’ll paraphrase the story he told.

Dad called me the other night. He said, "Michael, I was watching myself in an old movie earlier tonight and I didn't remember making it." "Well, Dad, you made over 70 movies and you are 94. Don't be so rough on yourself." "No, Michael, you didn't let me finish. I realized halfway through that I was watching one of your movies."

Wouldn't it be wonderful if certain aspects of our lives and ways of relating to others were all but indistinguishable from Jesus and if they reminded others of Jesus, just a little bit? We seek, every day, in every place, to be emissaries of Jesus: representatives of Jesus who welcome others as if they were Jesus and who relate to others in the spirit of Jesus? Our task (Matthew 10:37-42) is to consciously attend to the Christ in everyone. Christ in the stranger. Christ in the enemy. Christ in the friend. Christ in the spouse. Christ in our sibling. Christ in the politician who makes our blood boil. Christ in the one who believes differently than I do.

Do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Matthew's community was experiencing serious persecution. It would be decades before Christians were even called Christians and would be persecuted solely "for the name." Nevertheless, Matthew's followers were getting into trouble for the same reasons that Jesus and Paul did.

 

Sarah Dylan Breuer, an Episcopal priest from Cambridge MA, conducts a workshop called "Speaking the Truth in Love: Practical Skills for Reconcilers." She believes that there are essential skills that are foundational and vital to the process of reconciliation. Matthew’s (Mathew 10:26-33) Gospel selected for this Sunday calls to mind those skills.  

The first skill requires that we keep an open mind, listen and be as fully “present” to the process of sincerely trying to understand one another. The second skill is to be in touch as much as possible with God's love. We want to really know and experience God’s extravagant and unconditional love. 

Matthew’s community deferred to God’s infinite love and wisdom and not to the ruling powers of the time. They were taught and believed that God gave every human being the ability to make their own decisions. Each had gifts to offer the community and they didn't need to ask anyone's permission to do so. As such, they built pockets of communities within their overarching Christian community, based on Christ’s teaching, into a radical new order and therefore threatened to undermine the order of the Empire.  

And so their neighbors, their friends, and sometimes their own family turned them in, hauling them before governors as agitators to be flogged, or worse. While we can only imagine, being betrayed by those so close to us would wound as deeply as any physical punishment.  

The one thing that Matthew wants his followers to remember isn't something they're supposed to say or some particularly compelling case that they should make to their accusers or the authorities. It, more than anything else, is that they need to embrace how very much God loves them. This is good advice for anyone living in Christ's reconciling ministry.   

Sooner or later, if you're a part of that ministry, you'll find yourself making contact with very deep wounds, and wounded people. And all wounded creatures are liable to respond to any overture out of pain, confusion, and anger. A person who comes back at them with more of the same is only going to speed up the spiral of violence, with disastrous results. What we want to do in a situation like that is to be present and loving; that's the only way to disrupt that spiral of violence. That's very hard to do, though, when someone is right in front of you either threatening violence or saying something that would normally provoke a "fight or flight" response…something that's sure to happen eventually if you're trying to be an agent of healing.   

In a situation like that, we're understandably tempted to withdraw -- to "check out" mentally if not remove ourselves physically…or to strike back, or both. I think part of what makes those temptations particularly strong is that contact with another person's deep wounds often reminds us of our own wounds and vulnerabilities that we've tried to forget. That's why reconcilers must remind themselves moment to moment to stay grounded in God's love. If we remember how much and how unconditionally God loves and values us, we won't be thrown off-center by anyone's attempts to make us feel as worthless. Rely on the power of God's love to heal, and we won't have to flee from things that remind us of our own vulnerabilities and wounds. Recall what God's love looks like in the flesh…in the person of Jesus, and we will know how to respond. Be in touch with that love at the very core of our being, and we will be able to respond with authenticity and with love no matter what we face.  

Don't worry about what to say. There's a reason Martin Luther King called the result of nonviolent resistance "beloved community." It is the community of those who know, who proclaim, and who embody the Good News that love is the fundamental, powerful, and inevitable Word through which the universe was made and lives, and for which it is destined. We have seen the Word made flesh in Jesus, and we see it embodied in and among us. That can't be stopped by violence. Bringing violence to bear against God's love only creates more opportunities for God's love to disrupt the spiral of violence and build a beloved community.

Thanks be to God!

 

Adapted from SarahLaughed.net, by Sarah Dylan Breuer, an Episcopal priest who was elected to the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church by General Convention in 2009.

You Are What You Eat

 

Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…John 6:51-58

Whoa!!! Imagine hearing this for the first time. Imagine hearing this without any previous experience of the Eucharist.  We know that some in the crowd took such offense at Jesus that they stopped following him because he said these things—Jesus doesn’t soften or temper his words in the least. There’s not even a hint that he might be speaking poetically or metaphorically. He’s not quick to change the subject either.For us, these words may have lost their offensiveness. But, Jesus didn’t drop these rhetorical bombshells so that they’d be easily forgotten. It’s clear that He was stirring the pot on purpose. He wanted to say things that challenged people 

Imagine you are attending church for the first time as this passage is read!

Imagine hearing Jesus say these words. How would you react??? 

Once again John relies on mystical words to speak to each of us in that place in which the personal images of reality and life itself reside. John invites us to close our eyes and picture what being in a relationship with God really means. Note, I use the word “picture,” not “understand,” in an effort to prompt our imagination and senses to feel the words as a palpable, sensory experience, and know what being in a relationship with God actually feels like, tastes like, and smells like. This is at the essence of our being and what we mean when we say “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” God fully shared our humanity through Jesus as we through Jesus, fully share in God’s divinity. Anything less than that relationship with God would be reduced to mere acquaintance. 

St. Augustine used the phrase “visible words” to help explain the connection between the sacraments and our daily lives. Baptism and Communion are visible, physical manifestations of our faith. In other words, the sacraments are the embodiment of the gospel in the material form of water, bread, and wine. They serve as the physical presence of what we have heard and believe because we are physical creatures. And so the gospel is proclaimed so that we may hear it, and this very same gospel comes alive to us in the Eucharist as we taste, touch and feel it with our hands, our mouths and our bodies.

My Prayer to the Holy Trinity

Dear God, I don’t want to pass the buck but your being within me hasn’t been discussed too often or too clearly. I hate to sound critical but this doctrine on the Indwelling has been passed over rather superficially in my early religious training. I never heard this from the nuns or the bothers in grade and high schools!

Yet Lord, all the while, deep down I wanted your love and the reassurance of your love, always trying to earn it. So you can see why your Indwelling strikes me as strange and foreign. Now I’m being told that I don’t have to say the prayers the way I was taught and had memorized. No, rather I should converse naturally, be familiar and relaxed like you’re one of the family because you Eternal Three, have made your home within me.

Of course I hesitate. My religious training emphasized that you were the one who would punish me if I even talked in Church... and as a youngster I remember confessing it. It was a sin. I was trained to be meticulously respectful when I came into your presence, as if your presence was only in my Church. (I remember feeling guilty for a long time when Sister Janice discovered us in the choir loft, playing the organ one Saturday afternoon. Who knew she was preparing the sacristy for Sunday Mass! I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to face her ire on Monday or roast in hell forever?) Now, I’m being told that your presence is within me! And I’m supposed to be comfortable with you. I feel as though I should hold my breath.

Dear God, now I’m learning not to think of grace as the absence of sin but as a gift of your presence, Father, Son and Spirit within me.  And that you are closer to me than I am to myself and that you want to be for no other reason except that you love me. That is so beautiful that I really want to hold on to this feeling forever.

I’m trying to understand that the more aware, conscious, alert, and attentive I am to your triune presence within me, the more I will find you in all things. Dear God, I really do want this.

Frankly, I must admit that in the past I hadn’t given much thought to your presence, your intimacy, you activity within me. What a love you must have for me! A genuine, boundless, omnipotent, all-present, eternal, home love within me! I certainly need a mature faith for this. I no longer can go just gliding along the surface of my old religious practices anymore, can I?

Thank you Lord.

In the Name of the Father, from whom we came and to whom we are going, and to the Son, in whom we find our true self, and to the Holy Spirit, the divine aliveness in our innermost life. Amen                                                                                        

(John 3:16-18)

(adapted from  Ronald T. Haney SJ, God Within You, Mysticism for the 21^st Century, pp. 150-151)